No Shortcuts in the Streamer Wars

Whether that scramble for specific influencers makes actual sense and impact for their platforms, however, is highly disputable. The relationship between influencer popularity and platform growth is not nearly as straightforward as it may seem.

NINJA THEORY

Of course, there are some exceptions to the trend. Streamer Valkyrae, for instance, successfully grew her audience of roughly one million Twitch.tv followers to a hearty 3.59 million YouTube subscribers, going from a 2.4k average viewership to 16.5 thousand. But a story like hers is very much in the minority — the general rule is that the most popular streamer on that platform is still secondary to the ecosystem that platform provides. In Twitch’s case, the ecosystem is on the back-end — Amazon’s purchase of the platform back in 2017 expands its cloud capabilities to include industry-leading livestreaming technologies that it then sells access to anybody that needs its Interactive Video Services functions, while also using Twitch itself as an onboarding ramp for Amazon Prime.

That ecosystem is hard for its competitors to duplicate. Even just the Twitch-level interactivity suites alone — the emojis, the subscription models, the programs and categorization methods that allow for so much user-side retention — is something that their peers are coming in late on.

Granted, it may be a mere matter of time before they’re fullying caught up.

FACEBOOK SURGE

What is dead may never die, but get absorbed by bigger and more ambitious corporate entities. Mixer as a discrete platform may be gone, but its suite of technologies was absorbed into the Facebook empire mid-2020.

Much like Twitch.tv, Facebook’s fundamental advantage is at the community engagement level — one that the acquisition of Mixer’s set of gameified interactivity tools only further strengthens and enforces. And it’s one that YouTube structurally lacks — for now.

READY, AIM…

YouTube also has inherent advantages to work off — nobody else is offering similar VOD storage and access, and they’re inherently in a better state than Twitch.tv for Tiktok-style short-form content delivery via their mobile app and the development of multi-pipeline funneling structures towards creators.

While they will still be playing catchup to Twitch.tv and Facebook — there is no established timeline for when all of this will be implemented in 2022 — YouTube is gigantic enough unto itself that the delay shouldn’t be lethal.

But that probably means any top creator not actively negotiating with YouTube for a slot on their roster will soon see that window close. The value they bring, after all, is secondary to having internally cultivated talent grow into profitable size for effectively free.

The current contract wars, then, are the interim act for the next stage of the war for eyeballs. The weapons they will bring to bear will be significantly more sophisticated than the crude purchase of well-known names.

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